


Solitude

by Akaiberubetto



Category: Supernatural
Genre: I'm Sorry Dean Winchester, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Non-Consensual Blood Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:28:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24198253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akaiberubetto/pseuds/Akaiberubetto
Summary: "Give me a goodbye kiss." He demanded.
Relationships: Lucifer/Sam Winchester
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Solitude

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [孤寂](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23986108) by [Akaiberubetto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akaiberubetto/pseuds/Akaiberubetto). 



> Inspired by Black Sabbath - Solitude

Dean held the gun in his hand and set it on the bar upon a piece of dark green flannel. He ordered himself two shots of whiskey with a downcast head, fingers regularly tapping against the bar: knock knock, knock knock knock, knock. His companion shifted his hips in the high chair, reading aloud from the book:

"Aliud est amor, longe aliud est cupido ①."

"Enough," said Dean. "Stop it, Crowley."

Crowley deliberately paused for an instant, plump fingers turning a page, and intoned another one:

" In vitium dūcit culpae fuga ②."

Closing the front and back covers in between his palms, he leaned forward and moved away the empty glass from in front of him. Those cunning rounded eyes looked straight in the other man's side face through a glorious halo of pink.

"What’s that?" Dean sneered. "Your treasure trove of love?"

"It's not for me." Crowley answered. "Confident enough to say that I don’t need that kind of stuff. Speaking of which, I thought you knew one thing or two about me. Always have to be such a disappointment."

"Well, so you're selling this crap to me – thanks Crowley, I needed that."

"Just a few word-of-mouth maxims." Crowley said. "Won’t hurt your ears, let alone your mind. Believe me, there is some wisdom worth remembering in them."

Dean pursed his lips and smiled the answer. He pinched the rim of a shot glass with his thumb and forefinger, tilted his head and drank off the content. Bottom up. A few golden syrupy drops flowed out. Crowley gazed at him in a perfect stillness; when the red-shirted one was about to pick up a second shot, he jerked forward and clenched Dean’s hand in his own.

"Wait a minute," he said. "I want to ask you something."

"About what?" Dean asked, dour green eyes glancing askance over.

"About your brother."

"What happened to him?"

"That's exactly the question I want to ask you: what happened to him? The last time my boys saw him, his got a broken arm; they said he had been badly injured."

"I see," said Dean. "So now you’re starting to care about Sam's health. What's wrong with you, Crowley?"

"You know what I'm talking about, darling."

"Honestly? I really don't."

"You can keep on like this," said Crowley, letting go of his hand. "Pretending you've done nothing, lying straight to my face - that's fine, Dean, that’s excellent. In fact, it just makes you more of a demon."

Demon. He slightly stretched the first syllable to make it sound like his name. DE-AMON. Dean picked up the other glass with his freed hand, lifted it mid-air, tossing the rim to his bottom lip, and stopped thoughtfully.

"This is about the gun, is it?" He asked as he put down his shot.

"What?"

"The Colt." He nudged the silvery barrel, the pentagram at the lower part of the grip pointed squarely at the other demon. "You asked me to bring it here. Does it have anything to do with Sam?"

He paused for a moment, smiling his gratitude at the bartender of a shapely figure. She took the emptied shot glass in her hand and asked joyfully through a cascade of lustrous pale gold:

"What else can I get you?"

"Nothing." Crowley answered for him. He waved as a gesture for her to walk away.

"To be honest with you, I was going to leave moose behind, at first. If you, his flesh-and-blood brother, don't even ask about him anymore, then why should I do so? But my subordinates kept bringing me disturbing news. One week ago, they came to me with a reliable source that someone was killing my boys - thanks to your brother, now they are all cowering at the crossroads. It's not a big deal, I thought, as long as you keep laying low as I told you so, he would eventually give up. Over the next few days, things went pretty much as I expected: the wailing sound of banshee was fading away. To me it seemed like he had, finally, quitted, not to mention that a few of my freelancers reached out to me, saying that they had seen him winged and wounded. That’s why two days ago, I sent some of my best boys to find his whereabouts, 'Elite Squad', as you may like to call them - all picked by myself. But guess what? None of them came back."

"Shame," said Dean. "But that doesn't say much. You should have known that it’s the bottom price you have to pay for trying to take down my brother – he’s not someone you want to mess with, despite of a broken arm."

"After that, my dependable deputy paid him a visit in person and brought back their meatsuits." Crowley picked up where he left off. "The strange thing is that they are all quite… clean. Clear of bullet or stab wounds, seemed like they had been frigging exorcised."

"Except that you knew they hadn’t been sent back to hell."

"Yes," said Crowley. "They were once and for all wasted. Now, would you like to enlighten me on what this is all about?"

"So you think it was Sam who killed them." Dean said. "Well, with what, his psychic mojo? Did you happen to realize that......"

"He needs demon blood to do that." Crowley cut him off bluntly. "Yes, I'm well aware of that."

"Are you hinting that someone is feeding him on demon blood?"

"I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?"

"Just so you know," said Dean. "He's been clean for…like five or six years. Even if you’re right, a few tens of milliliters at a time is still too low a dose to power him up like that. None of your men was drained, were they?"

"Yes, this didn't make any sense to me, at first. But then all in a sudden I thought, maybe, maybe it wasn't just some ordinary demon’s blood." Crowley said. "What if it's the blood of a Knight of Hell?"

A mark. That was what suddenly shielded his sight: a prophetic dark red symbol that foresaw every turning point from the past to the future, signifying everything that was long predestined before the birth of this universe. Through his babyhood years, his mother would use tarot, the celestial orb and spells to divine for herself, her long tangerine-colored curls falling loosely across the wood table, the surface of which was dotted with crusts of lamp oil. An evil omen, she said with that musical yet affected voice of hers, a bad omen. Whenever he cried because of hunger or something else, she would cast a disgusted look over from beneath the only light source in the room. Next to the round-shaped red candle, Dean rose from his high chair and drank his second shot in one gulp. The evil omen rose slowly from upon his right forearm.

"You asked me to bring the Colt here," he said as he nudged Colt towards his left. "Alright, I’ve brought the gun. Now take it and get the hell out of my way."

"You know you’ve made a mistake, in every sense of the term." whispered Crowley. "I don't really care if you’d like to cut your wrist open and shove it into someone’s mouth, but let’s make it clear here: first, that bloodlust of his was made for Satan and Satan only, a real bottomless pit. No matter how much you fill it in, he’s only going to desire more; second, this isn’t just some drifter we're talking about, it’s Sam."

He finished his sentences but remained unanswered. The other one turned his face away, lips trembling yet without a sound coming out. A face of the one who had lost it all. A mouth that was avoiding its own past.

"Does it matter?" Dean said, turning his back on him. "Did the idea ever occur to you that maybe all of this has been because it is Sam....."

He cut off his unfinished words and walked towards the cool radiance of morning sun. The door quietly closed behind him.

❋ ❋ ❋

Satan, dressed all in black, came forward from the other end of the long table. He approached the window and gazed out towards the gloomy sky and dark mountains in the distance, one hand fumbling for something in his coat pocket. A cigarette case. He took one out of the remaining two, fingers clamping over the middle of it, drew a lighter out of another pocket on the other side and lit the cigarette. From where the flaming spunk rose a delicate sweet fragrance was born. A pair of pale blue eyes peered forward.

"You keep asking questions about what you already knew." Sam Winchester's young voice rang out from not afar. Around between the long table and bookshelves he walked, his phone pressed close to ear. In between moments of silence he fiddled with those book spines, pushing and pulling, light and dark blue colors of theirs huddled together like waves upon waves.

"So what?" He halted for a while and continued. "Are you saying that he must pay in himself the debt they owed?" His slender fingers lingered for a second on the word "Wake" ③ and quickly slid over the gilded capital "J" below. "I don't care. Even if he’s the one who chose to fall...."

"Yes." Lucifer said. "Exactly."

He abstemiously took a puff, lips pouted to blow a ray of cyan-blue smoke into the dim air; Sam glanced up and said nothing. A taut, yet unfrightened face floating amid the shadows.

" 'One cannot trip twice over the same thing,' " he turned away. "Yes, I know exactly what you mean, Dean. But it's really not that convincing when you're making repeated mistakes yourself."

"Just because I've done something wrong doesn't mean my words are also wrong." His brother said from the other side, with a hint of warning in his tone like usual. "More importantly, it doesn't make yours any righter. Listen, whatever crazy ideas you have right now - put them away. We can't let him walk around freely like that, not this time. What are you gonna do now, hmm? Do your little talking and expect that all in a sudden he’ll reclaim his heart of gold? He's utterly screwed! And deep down inside you know that better than I do."

"Well, should I?"

"I don't wanna go on with this topic."

"Sure you don't," said Sam. "This attitude of yours has nothing to do with the case itself, does it?"

Dean's voice trailed off from the other end: no answer was offered. After a while he said:

"You're in the library downtown?"

"Yeah."

"I'll pick you up at…say 6:30. The weather forecast said there would be a rainstorm at dusk."

"I already knew that." Sam said.

He pressed the button twice in a row to hang up on his brother, then put the phone back into his jacket pocket and stepped out of the gray shadows between bookshelves. All seats along the white table were left vacant by the departure of those who originally took them. Satan grinned at him from beside the window.

"Dean," he said, "A dictator at his young age, I’d say. Though he himself is unaware of that."

Sam tilted his head downwards and reached out to gather all the papers that had been scattered across the table into a pile, clamping them with black and silvery paper clips before tucking them into that grayish-green zippered duffel bag. He seemed disinterested in the comment.

"Or maybe there’s more than that...he makes a mess of everything and then does his best to make amends. As it is, you should realize that the way he treated you was not fair."

"And you're just so much better than him?"

"That's not what I meant." Lucifer said. "All I ever wanted was to give you a little warning."

"I don't care what you want of me," said Sam. "Just leave Dean out of it. Not everything has to do with him."

"Unfortunately, this whole thing really is about him. He is, after all, born to be my brother's vessel."

"But he won’t become Michael’s vessel."

"Just like you are not going to be my vessel," Lucifer smiled assent and continued. "But you can’t be so sure right now, can you?"

He blew out the last puff of the dizzying blue smoke, scabbed eyelids closed and reopened, ominous red eyes venturing a look through the fissure in between: no anger was perceived from upon the other one’s face. After an instant Sam queried:

"And why’s that?"

"Because I know you."

"You think you know."

"You can see it that way," said Lucifer. "If it means any consolation to you. But you must understand that the panorama of your whole life is but a fleeting glimpse compared to the scale of mine. I know your past and your present, so I know every one of the choices you will make: you will do everything you can to shove me back into that box, even if that means you’ll have to say 'yes' to me, and we must eventually meet on the other side."

He paused for some seconds, cigarette-clamping fingers drooping to one side of his body.

"I’m actually impressed by your little idea," he went on. "Turning your own soul into a glittering silver coin and dropping it straight into that money box in exchange for a letter of indulgence. It did occur to me that you are willing to give up whatever it takes to cancel all those accusations that fell upon your shoulders and to pay for the sins that should long be paid - for Dean, in the first place, and then for yourself. Even so, you know that he'll always hold a grudge, don’t you? With all those pain and injustice their father has imposed on them those good sons still carry on well, but only betrayal they cannot bear."

He uttered the very word with a distinct tone. Betrayal. Sam, casting a glance towards the face that was shrouded in the shades by the window, asked coldly:

"Of whom are you speaking, Dean or Michael?"

❋ ❋ ❋

Dean Winchester. He repeated the name poignantly, slowly stretching his arms to tug at a corner of the green flannel and dragged it towards himself alongside the Colt lying upon it. He stroked the cold firm barrel of it, fingertips pressing against those curling vine leaves carved on the slender shape. An exquisite work of art. Nevertheless, an idea suddenly came to him as he was adoring it: now even a masterpiece like this cannot erase the existence of Dean as the force of a mortal man can never erase an evil omen. Waiting and waiting is all that you do. Wait. Until it is realized.

He wrapped the gun in flannel and tucked it into his left inside breast pocket. Helena the blond reappeared at the back of the bar, her eyes two well-polished obsidians shimmering beneath the curved eyelashes.

"The alley to the right of the back door," she said. "He’ll meet you there."

So he walked out along a path far different from the one Dean had taken. In the distance, the sound of wing strokes rose and fell in tune with his forward steps; a cold water droplet fell upon his cheek. Crowley raised up his right hand to wipe it away: he recognized it as the rain that had fallen last night. A silhouette stood amid the pale green effulgence of early morning, and as he came closer it parted its lips to frame his name:

"Crowley."

"Lucifer." He answered.

"I’m delighted that you still remember that name." Lucifer said, an imperceptible smile rising to his face.

"And I'm not the only one."

"I think so. The blonde girl, what's her name, Helen?"

"Helena." Crowley corrected him. "She’s still loyal to you."

"Such a comfort," said Lucifer. "Guess you would get even with them one day, when this is all over. Now I want to take a look at what I asked for. Where is it?"

"SUPER SPOTTUM." Crowley said as he lifted the left front of his coat. Where his gaze pointed, a curved wooden grip protruded sideways from the upper edge of the pocket.

"Oh," said Lucifer, slightly narrowing his eyes as if trying to see clearer. "Yes, I think this is the one I’m talking about."

"It is the one," said Crowley. "The only one."

He drew Colt out of his coat pocket but left the flannel inside.

"Let's make this clear: now between you and me there is no such thing as order or debt, only deals. Business. We have already agreed on a price. Now I’m holding up my end of the bargain, and you must, too, hold yours."

Satan entered in the shape of a serpent and twined around the vines, baring its dewy green scales. With a forked thin tongue it hissed out those poisonous words, and the evil eyes of its, staring out of abomination, were soaked with pure venom. Those eyes were now gazing into him from a few steps away, only they had long since turned into the eyes of a sentimental human being.

"Of course I'll keep my word." He said as he took the gun. Even that voice was but a low sound resulting from the vibration of human vocal cords.

"To be honest with you, it all feels rather weird to me…Once I gave it to Dean Winchester so that he could use it on you; now I take it back from him and give it to you. What can I say? Fortune has always been a fickle one, constantly demanding back what she gave ④."

"Fortune?" Lucifer said. "No, I wouldn't say it was fortune’s handiwork."

He lowered his head to fiddle with the hammer, once, twice. By the time he looked up again, Crowley was nowhere to be seen. All demons were created with the same template. They were envious, lecherous and ravenously insatiable, with a piercing smile on their faces, demanding a price that always far exceeded the benefit they actually offered; and in the middle of a story they disappeared into the moistened morning air, leaving behind only a faint whisper.

"The way he treated you was far from fair." He muttered to himself. To whom was he speaking? Back in the cage, he too had spoken eloquently of love, sin and soul. He would begin with his furthest memories, portraying in every possible detail the years he had spent with his brothers before they turned against each other. He spoke of the blazing gold trim of Michael's giant dark-red wings and the mischiefs of Gabriel in the garden. The way he treated me was unfair, and so was the way I treated him; but he had no hatred of me, and with all his faults I loved him still. The only audience for him dwelled on his own past, always seeming adrift and estranged in spite of the fact that the other fallen one was the only entity within his reach amid the immortality there. From time to time the idea would suddenly occur to him as he gazed over the stillness towards Sam that he might have indeed been in love with him, but nevertheless it could be but a tease that came at the most inopportune times, with a hint of condescending frivolity or even some kind of melancholy deeper inside. The way he treated you was far from fair, he said to Sam. And he would ask him back: and you are so much better than him?

He gripped the Colt to feel the cold smooth touch of metal with his palm. In that town where death had paid his visit, Dean Winchester put a bullet in his brain with this gun, loaded. He's a good shot, which was obviously a result of all those trainings started since his childhood years. You shall grow up to be a soldier, his father said to him, grow up to be a soldier, and then avenge your mother. He spoke first to his older son, and then turned to the younger one with the same words. He had such love for him deep down in his heart, yet kept reproaching him; meanwhile he knew better than anyone the unreasonableness of such reproach. Guilt drove his sight away from his youngest son - he knew that he should have lived a life without the burden of vengeance, like the rest of God’s creatures in this world; he needn’t have paid in his own life and person the debt someone else made. Still, they had walked on to where they were today, and now it was the hand of his, not Dean’s, that was holding the gun.

As he made his way up the narrow lane to the main street, a cloudy white flashed swiftly past him. Those long hair, uncombed and entangled with a fine ribbon of silk, nestled about the girl's head; a piece of white dress tainted with dirt sweeping across his calves.

"Take this, sir." She said as she fought to tuck a clump of roses, blooming and withered, into his arms. "Buy a bunch for your lover."

Men and women walking on either side of the street lowered their heads coincidentally and hurried forward. The hem of a skirt starched with blood stain still clung to his calf.

"Buy a bunch, sir." The voice of the apparition continued.

In that instant a thought struck him: what if **he** is now watching over from above? So he raised his head high, looking up to the greyish-cyan-colored vault of heaven. The voice of his father should have come down from there, but all he could hear was silence. Silence, silence. The omnipotent one, silent as he always were, gazed into the handiwork of his own, only to let out a sigh of O at the very end. The heaving narrow chest was still clinging to his side, her breath an odor of putrid white flowers. She was supposed to be with him.

"I’m in no need of these." He said.

"Buy a bunch." She answered, skinny hands reaching forward along with the bouquet of flowers in them, her body passing through his meatsuit like a figure of hallucination. There he slowly turned: the back view of a girl with ebony tress on her shoulders was long gone. The sun that had dispelled the fog was shining fierily upon gray and white buildings. The moistened ground took on a dull dark brown color, as if it were stained with the blood that had been shed by millions upon millions of souls in this world. As he turned right at the end of the street, a scarlet bird swept past above him; in a sudden trance he found his eyes hurt from gazing into the blazing red, which he mistook for a glimpse of his brother’s face.

❋ ❋ ❋

"What difference does it make?" Lucifer said. "If you ask me, my brother and yours are a match made in heaven and on earth. Courage, loyalty, they were born blessed with these. As for ambition...they are not lacking in ambition, just rather limited. In the presence of the mighty father who created them, they were blind worshippers and soldiers under orders; now in the absence of that father, they are still worshippers and soldiers."

"Meaning what?"

"You think the love Michael had for me would be any less than the one Dean has for you? Back in the old days, Michael loved me exactly the same way as Dean now loves you. The only difference is that Dean loves you even more than he loves your father, whereas Michael loved Him more than he loved me. But like I said, none of them tolerates betrayal, even if it's just their wishful thinking. When Michael drew the conclusion that I had betrayed our father's will, he forsook me, threw me into that cage almost without any hesitation; think about it: what did Dean do when he discovered that little secret of yours? He claimed that whatever he had said or done to you then was a product of disappointment, but you," he pointed to Sam and then to himself. "And me, we both know that was anger, maybe even a bit of jealousy."

"Anger or disappointment," said Sam. "Whatever he felt, he had his reasons. I would have reacted the same if it had been him opening the cage."

"Because you feel you've made a mistake - a great one. Everyone was persuading you into redemption: you have to do something about it, they said, even if the redemption comes hand in hand with eternal agony." Lucifer said. "But nobody ever told you how it had been, or how it was gonna be."

He came forward from where he was standing; following his move Sam immediately took a step back. So Satan stood right at his post.

"You're scared of me." He said, as if surprised by his reaction. "Do you really think that I would ever come at you with sophistry, temptation and violence? I have given you my words: I will not hurt you, much less lie to you. It was, it is, and it always will be like that."

Sam asked back:

"But for what?"

"You should be clear about that." Lucifer said. He again stared at Sam for an instant, and meanwhile Sam was gazing back into him, as if to judge whether he had lied. Between blue and green, a voice emerging from the damp silence sneered coldly at them with vaguely pronounced words. The latter took the lead to turn his head aside.

"Then you too should understand," he said. "that even if I gave you my consent, none of these would be beyond what He had already planned. You call Michael a blind follower and soldier, what then do you call yourself? A rebel? But you’re just as well walking the exact same way as He has planned for you."

"There will be a different path if you choose to follow me."

"Follow you to fall."

"Yes, but along the way to the end of it, what you’ll gain will be far greater than what you have lost. What now do you have to lose anyway? You regard what I said as corruption and depravity – of course you can see it that way, but depravity sums up the ultimate truth of all beings. I’ve seen the morning star fall from the zenith to the nadir, Eve and Adam banished from the Eden, Cain killing his brother in the field; later the angels fought over the dome for their seats in heaven, and all those righteous men busied slaughtering each other for the gold buried under their feet. Can’t you see the whole point in these? Everything new is just a replay of the old. As all of these began with His rising, so shall it end with His falling. This is the one and only thing he failed to hold in his own hands."

"The fall."

"Yes." Lucifer answered softly. "The fall."

Sam did not answer. He threw the bag strap over his right shoulder and turned, walking towards the entrance through which he had come in. Satan followed him through the narrow door as the clock on the wall read 6:16 p.m. They went on in a perfect silence, dark-blue clouds lingering on from both sides like a dim tide rising up higher and higher. Lucifer, quickening his pace, walked on beside Sam and said:

"You must understand that what Azazel forced on you will eventually come back to you. What have been written down are meant to happen, sooner or later, but they will always manifest themselves one after another."

His voice went deep and tender, as if speaking with an attempt of persuasion or comfort, but the words fell drastically like the cold rain which shall yet fall. Sam halted for a moment and went on as if nothing had happened.

"Says who, you or God?" He asked, neither turning back nor slowed down by the talking.

"I am not talking about His masterplan. He did have all these in mind eons ago: my vessel shall be born, and Azazel shall drop his blood into your mouth. But there will always be another way to walk besides what He had planned, except that none of them leads to an end other than to fall. You long to rebel against the role He assigned you, which, I assure you, is likely; but even if you managed to tear up the script with my father’s handwriting on it, where then could you go?"

"So it's better to fall with you now?"

"It's the best of all options."

They stopped at the end of the corridor one after the other. Sam turned, looking at the other one from where he was standing and said:

"What if I’m bent on going another way?"

He was so familiar with that demeanor and that cold gaze. An image of his face, the side and back view of his figure. He wore a brown hooded windbreaker, not the cadet-blue jacket; he spoke with the voice that belonged to his twenty-seven-year-old self. At that moment it suddenly occurred to him from nowhere that many illustrious people died at the age of twenty-seven.

"I knew you would always go the other way," he replied at length. "You will say 'no' to me no matter what I say or what I do. That is why we're here today."

❋ ❋ ❋

He was not sure where he should be heading: here, or there. Direction means nothing but a few syllables to him. He framed the words "forward" and "backward", "left" and "right" with his tongue, like a toddler trying to conjugate a verb or decline a noun. He chose those secluded alleys over avenues, treading upon the ground with his feet rather than grace; but at last he reached his destination still, a flashing neon sign marking the end of his journey. Wilderness. That is where he was going. His heart sank the moment he caught a glimpse of the row of white doors from afar, the barrel of the Colt that pressed against the small of his back burning red as if tossed into flames. He shoved both hands into the pockets and circled from the farther side towards that door. One, three, four. Silently he read the black numbers that hung loosely on the door, first from left to right, then again from right to left. As he drew the key made in brass out of his pocket, a piece of worn string became entangled with another piece.

He heard the door lock pop open with a soft thud. The curtains were closed but inside the gloomy room no light was on. A voice from his left said:

"What is this? Another vision?"

"I'm sorry," said Lucifer. "But this is real."

He flipped the switch to the other side, ears still untouched by a welcome buzz. So he dialed it back and repeated again the move.

"The light’s out." Sam said in a hoarse whisper.

"I've always hated places like this." Lucifer said. He lifted the black-out curtains which were patterned with diamonds and trimmed with beige tassels to hold them back onto the hooks from which they hung. Heavily they sank into his arms: layers upon layers of waves.

"I've lived in places like this my whole life." said Sam. "Still don't like them. But that doesn’t matter anymore now. This time it will be final."

The pale bluish light of morning fell upon his features, delicate and clear, the thin lips pursing slightly in between words. I've lived in places like this my whole life, he said. But this is going to be the last time. I have done all the deeds I should do and waited all the time I should wait.

"I get you what you had asked for." Lucifer said.

"From Dean?"

"From Crowley," he replied. "But Dean handed it to him with his own hands."

"So he knows."

"Maybe he does, maybe not."

An instant of silence was all he got for a reply. After a while Sam said:

"It doesn't matter."

"Sure," said Lucifer. He himself was convinced that it was not a lie. "It doesn't really matter."

He plucked out the Colt, but seized it tightly instead of handing it over or settling it on the square table by the window. Colt. He recalled the first name of the gunmaker. His full name was Samuel Colt, for which his families and friends would call him Sam. It's a common name: Sam. Despite knowing the answer, he asked still:

"What did you see in the vision?"

"You know what I saw."

"But you still chose the same path, the path that has led you here."

"You know that just as well." Sam said.

The soft tone he spoke with was no different compared to the old days, as was the coldness of his words. At the age of seven, seventeen and twenty-seven, he’s always been speaking to his brother in this way; now with his brother long gone he still spoke in the same way.

"Here’s the thing," said Lucifer. "What you have seen there might not be real, but not a single word of what I have said to you was a lie. I told you that what Azazel forced on you would eventually return to you, and now it does return to you; I also told you that no path would lead to an end other than depravity, and that Dean was always meant to become what he is today if you chose to reject me then. You must understand that I did not say those out of hatred."

The other one looked away and queried:

"Then what for?"

"You know what it was for." He said. "You should be crystal clear."

A tune whose source he himself could barely remember. A dreamily gaze at the image of earth: the setting sun, dark-blue waters of the bay, and the jagged rocks by the shore. Through all those years spent in the cage, endless memories had been besetting his brain, in the linear narrative of which everything new was just a repetition of the old, the ending circling back to the start like a snake holding onto its own tail. What had been born out of nothingness swiftly fell back into nothingness; what had just been created soon leaned into the embrace of destruction; two souls, once getting a little closer, immediately distanced themselves from each other. Love and sin were ultimately relegated to error: ERROR! _In vitium dūcit culpae fuga_. Those who try to escape are bound to be haunted by the error of their past. The one and only being he could reach out to amid eternity was now skipping away from him. He handed the gun forward, shoving it into the other man's hand; his glazing eyes burned into it, as if staring at the last page of the book.

Sam seized the grip and looked up.

"So," he said, "that's it?"

"Yes," replied Lucifer. "That's it."

He reached out the other hand and gently twined a loose hair of Sam’s behind his ear. All in a sudden Sam smiled. A pair of coldly-glistening green eyes cast a quick glance from underneath the shadow at the face that met their gaze before veiled again by the downcast eyelids. With a sideways tilt of the head he escaped his touch.

"You know," he said, "one way or another, I won’t be seeing you on the other side...I don't wanna see you there either. Guess we both know it’s not quite a pleasant place."

"I'm well aware of that." Lucifer said. "And now what? You fancy giving me a kiss to say goodbye?"

He withdrew the hand hanging in the air, sight sliding over the oval-shaped bruises on the other man’s cheekbones, his finely veined eye sockets, those bleeding lips and a small, light-colored mole on the left cheek. He was gazing into that pale young face with such indulgence, as if to search him through and through until he could read the very nature and soul of Sam Winchester – like all those times he had done back in the cage. As he were doing so, every last bit of flippancy born with the sin of pride was abruptly swept away from his heart.

"Give me a goodbye kiss." He demanded. In that instant, the expression on his face was far different from a moment ago.

Sam’s lips parted as though to frame the answer "no" - but never did a word of rejection come out. He seized Lucifer's left wrist, clutching at it as tightly as if he were holding onto a pen or a gun; then with a toss of his head he kissed him, lips hyperthermic from inflammation pressing against his. A faint stream of air burrowed through the thin gap between, tenderer than a sigh or a whisper. He halted there for some seconds, then let go of the hand and moved backwards, head hanging down, only an indistinct heat with an odor of blood wafting from where his lips had kissed; a moment later, even the remnant of that kiss vanished away in the morning air. And eventually there was nothing left.

2020.5.

**Author's Note:**

> ① Love is one thing, and desire is far another.  
> ② The avoiding of an error leads to a fault (Translated by C. Smart & Theodore Alois Buckley, 1863).  
> Original version: In vitium dūcit culpae fuga sī caret arte. (HORACE, ARS POĒTICA 31)  
> ③ The name of this book is “Finnegans Wake” (written by James Joyce).  
> ④ Originally in Latin: Levid est Fortūna: citō reposcit quod dedit. (PUBLILIUS SYRUS, SENTENTIAE L4)


End file.
